Death is too good for Kricketune and his moustache.

The way Giratina is described in Diamond and Pearl always had me thinking of it as a death god figure, kind of like Hades in Greek mythology – dark and terrifying, but not actually evil, and in fact vital to the maintenance of cosmic order.  The way Platinum portrays it (mostly in Cynthia’s speculation) seems to be saying that Giratina basically maintains the Distortion World as a ‘photo negative’ of the real world that can be used to restore any damage done to it on a cosmic level, which is why Cyrus’ attempts to take apart reality in Platinum fail.  If memory serves, the game uses the analogy of DNA, which has a similar system going on (errors can be detected because the two strands no longer match up right).  As for what would happen if the Distortion World no longer existed… well, I think that’s asking the wrong question.  Logically, it would be possible to use the ‘real’ world to repair or rebuild the Distortion World in just the same way.  The only way to destroy one would be to take apart both at the same time (as Cyrus attempts to do).

Basically, Giratina is kind of important for maintaining the stability of reality, as the caretaker of the Distortion World.  The Pokédex says that it was “banished for its violence” but I actually don’t think that’s true, because Arceus (presumably) has given it a vital role in the cosmology of the Pokémon universe.  Of course, as frightening as Giratina is, it makes sense that humans who encountered it might get the wrong idea about its nature and powers, hence the whole ‘death god’ thing.

Okay.  So.  Time supposedly flows with the beat of Dialga’s heart.  No word on the direction of causality involved there, though.  Does Dialga’s heartbeat cause time to flow, or does the flow of time cause Dialga’s heart to beat?  It’s a trick question, of course, because human conceptions of cause and effect function within a ‘normal’ time stream (whatever that means) – if neither one can possibly come ‘first,’ then neither one can be the ‘cause’ of the other in the sense that we understand the word, so it seems that they just happen together.  If Dialga is alive, time flows, and vice versa.  Any action taken that hurts Dialga is, by its very nature, harmful to the natural passage of time, and anything capable of altering the flow of time is, again by its very nature, harmful to Dialga.

Time, from a human perspective, is basically a way that we have of measuring change.  We invented ways of measuring time in order to keep track of the movement of the earth around the sun.  If time ‘stopped,’ though, every means we could possibly have of measuring time would stop with it, including our thoughts, so realistically, how would we ever know?  It very well could have happened sixteen times before I had breakfast this morning!  Unless there’s some objective way of keeping time which is standard throughout the universe, doesn’t rely on local frames of reference, and keeps changing regardless of any disruptions, the idea of time ‘stopping’ is meaningless anyway.  Dialga’s heartbeat could be that perfectly objective timepiece.  Of course, that would mean that Dialga never really ‘travels’ through time at all, because time itself is defined by Dialga’s lifespan – he’s just aware of, and experiences, every moment of his own existence simultaneously.  Nor does he ‘control’ time, any more than humans can ‘control’ the beating of our hearts – it’s just what he is.